Education: The Body as Critical Site, Performance at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC)

The School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s (SAIC) Department of Performance combines intensive studio practice with the rigorous critical, theoretical, and historical study necessary to inform individual aesthetic choices and expression. The core of the program is a series of interdisciplinary theory/practice lab courses that explore the use of the body as an expressive medium and critical site of research and action. The department’s interdisciplinary approach builds on a broad range of performative modes, including live actions, performance installation, movement research, tactical and site performance, interactive digital technologies, and performative writing.

Experience live student work at one of these events:

Spouting Off: The Lecture Performance
SAIC Performance Space, 280 S. Columbus Dr., room 012
Friday, February 24, 10:00 a.m.–6:00 p.m

Blurring the lines between art and knowledge, the Performance Lecture developed in the 1960s as a sub-genre of Performance Art. Chris Burden, Yvonne Rainer, Robert Morris, Robert Smithson, and Joseph Beuys all used this format to debate the conception, context, and circulation of an “artwork.” Today artists continue to push these boundaries in new and unexpected ways. Spouting Off is a one-day symposium that investigates the new horizons of this form. Presenters will include SAIC faculty, graduates, alumni, and visiting artists.

Undergraduate Performance Festival
SAIC Performance Space, 280 S. Columbus Dr., room 012
Saturday, March 31, 7:00 p.m.

Undergraduate students completing their degrees in Performance at SAIC present their thesis work in these not-to-be-missed programs that blur the boundaries between theater, movement, and the visual arts.

Graduate Performance Festival
SAIC Performance Space, 280 S. Columbus Dr., room 012
April 28 & 29, 7:00 p.m.

Graduate students completing their degrees in Performance at SAIC present their thesis works, which cross the borders of theater, movement, and the visual arts, and collectively present a vision of the next wave of performance art.

Abandoned Practices Institute in Prague, July 9–27
Institute Teachers: Lin Hixson, Matthew Goulish, and Mark Jeffery

This 3-week summer intensive looks forward by looking backward, researching, enacting, and embodying practices that for one reason or another have been disregarded in the wake of progress, and relegated to the archives of history. This year, the course relocates to Prague, Czech Republic, to explore and study this compact city, with 600 years of visible history, as an urban classroom and an inexhaustible catalogue of abandoned practices and endangered uses. Students will participate in individual and collaborative projects involving writing, installation, documentation, and live performance. Teachers and visiting scholars will lecture on related subjects. Available for credit and non-credit enrollment.

Abandoned practices constitutes an emerging field of inquiry pioneered by Alan Read of King’s College, London. The course will allow a thematic meeting place that confronts the common accelerated temporalities of the 21st century, whether in the form of economic and artistic globalization, technologies ceaseless upgrade, or the general shifts in understanding the word local. The course does not propose that we share a mutual part, but rather that we might mutually discover a shared strategy of thinking about our pasts, a strategy of reimagining and reenacting the different abandoned practices that once defined the ordinary.

abandonedpractices.org